Join us as Patty McManus, Beth O'Neill and Barry Rosen help you tackle the common challenges that go along with leading virtual teams. Our speakers will describe and demonstrate several practical skills and methods you can use right away to help team members and leaders improve the way they collaborate and perform.
 
At this interactive webinar, you will learn Ten Practical Tools and Techniques for:

• Setting up virtual teams for success

In a recent webinar that Patty McManus and I led — "Three Strategies to Succeed at Change (and what to do if it goes sideways)" — many change leaders in the audience expressed concern about sponsorship. The short headline: "Lack of sponsorship can wreck a change effort."

"Thank goodness more and more business and team meetings are being held virtually." "Goody! We’re meeting by conference call!" "If only all of our meetings could be virtual!"

Sound familiar? I’m guessing not. The fact is that virtual meetings are demanding and, sometimes, are a downright painful part of our normal workday. Think of the last time you posed a question on a call, only to hear the drawn out silence of muted phones in response. I like to call this the "crickets moment" (even though the crickets seem to be on mute, too).

Virtual teams often face difficulties solving problems, making decisions, generating innovative ideas, and reconciling differences. When team members don't meet with each other face-to-face, it can be harder to build rapport, develop trust, and establish meaningful collegiality. Team members multi-task, leaders fall back to presenting endlessly, and the work goes sideways.

In our June LeaderLens, Ashley Welch interviewed Elana Yonah, Co-Founder of Rise, who shared her perspective on Virtual Collaboration: Best Practices for Global Teams.

At Interaction Associates, we work with clients to achieve greater and more sustainable levels of business return on investment, by delivering a different ROI — Return on Involvement™. The primary way that we do this is by helping our clients to create cultures of involvement by developing a type of leader that we call the Facilitative Leader. They are best defined as leaders who demonstrate:

1) strategic thinking,

2) excellent collaborative skills, and

3) self awareness.

As the economic climate grows more challenging, business leaders worry about productivity and performance. In business, agreements are the links that connect strategy to execution, and ensure the urgent and necessary work gets done.

In his white paper, How Much YES Do You Need?, Jay Gordon Cone provides a model and an array of tips to ensure you are getting enough agreement to execute well, and succeed.

A work team's productivity and performance are affected by the team's structural interdependence, and its team members' use of collaborative skills.

In his article, "All for One and One for All," Jay Gordon Cone provides a model and a simple checklist to help you assess if your team is performing up to par --- and decide what to do if it's not.

With the tools provided in "All for One and One for All" by Interaction Associates Senior Consultant Jay Gordon Cone, you'll learn:

If you were to survey almost any professional group and ask who is working in a formal or informal matrix organization, chances are you'd see most hands in the air. Even if their companies have a formal organization structure aligned to market segments, products, or functional groups, most people have to contend with satisfying competing needs from multiple constituencies. All too often, the result is finding the "least worst" option rather than building agreements and reconciling the differences to serve all parties' needs and interests.

My daughter Hannah plays volleyball. It's a significantly more complicated version of the game I remember playing in gym class. It still involves six players on each side, but once the ball is served, they move around the court in choreographed sprints that look fairly chaotic to the untrained eye.